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Health Care for All Oregon is a grassroots coalition of over 100 organizations that are determined to create a better way of financing health care for every person who lives or works in Oregon. Our mission is to provide publicly funded, privately delivered, high quality, affordable, universal health care to everyone. People will be free to choose their medical provider to give them the care that they need, free to choose their career, job, and time of retirement independent of health care costs. We believe that health care is a human right. The care we receive should not be dependent on what we can afford. It is time we joined the rest of the free world and provided ourselves with publicly funded health care just like we do for education, libraries, fire fighters, and police.

The
TPP’s Threats to Public Health

The
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an international trade and
investment pact currently under negotiation between the United
States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia,
Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It is
also specifically intended as a “docking agreement” that
other countries would join over time, with Japan, Korea, China and
others already expressing some interest. U.S. negotiators
are pushing to complete the TPP as soon as possible.

NEGOTIATIONS
ARE HEADED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION ON PUBLIC HEALTH

A
roll back from the Bush administration. Leaked U.S. proposals
for several chapters in the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveal that
U.S. trade negotiators have reversed hard-won reforms designed
to enhance access to affordable medicines that were made during
the George W. Bush administration. In addition to pushing
for increased monopoly rights for drug companies, the U.S. is also
demanding new rights for pharmaceutical firms to challenge
pricing and other drug formulary policies used by many countries
to keep down health care costs.

Access
to generic medicine is critical to saving lives. The first
generation of HIV drugs has come down in price from roughly
$10,000 per patient per year to just $120 thanks to increased access
to generic medications. This reduction in price has helped
to dramatically scale up the number of people throughout the
world who are now receiving treatment. The Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the President’s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief, UNITAID and UNICEF all rely heavily on access
to quality generic medications. For millions of people
throughout the globe, delaying access to generic medications
means delaying access to treatment.

The
U.S. proposal would grant new monopoly patent rights, reducing access
to generic medicine. If finalized and implemented, the
leaked U.S. intellectual property proposal would roll back access
to generic medicine for people in developing countries and
throughout the world. Specifically, the U.S. proposal
would broaden the scope of patentability by making it
easier for pharmaceutical companies to patent new uses and minor
variations of old medicines; slow the production of new generics
when patents expire by expanding “data exclusivity” over
clinical trials forcing either the timely and costly replication
of such trials or an additional three-year delay (beyond
the current five) before such “exclusivity” ends; constrict
safeguards against patent abuse by making it harder for public
health advocates to challenge unjustified new patents; require
new forms of drug patent policing; and mandate that countries
allow patents on plants, animals and surgical methods. The
U.S. is expected to also request extensions beyond existing 20-year
drug patents to “compensate” drug companies for time spent
in regulatory approval processes.

International
public health advocates are speaking out. According to Doctors
Without Borders/Medecins San Frontieres: “Access to affordable
lifesaving medicines will be threatened where they are needed
most — in parts of the developing world — if the U.S. insists on
implementing restrictive intellectual property policies in the
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement... The leaked USTR
position paper, now available to the public, reveals that the U.S. is
pushing its trade partners, including developing countries, to
effectively lower the bar for granting patents, limit the capacity
to challenge patents, and impose new forms of intellectual
property enforcement — all measures that delay the
introduction of more affordable generic drugs.”

EMPOWERING
DRUG COMPANIES TO ATTACK COST-SAVING DRUG FORMULARIES

Governments
use cost-saving drug formularies keep drug prices in check.
Governments use formularies to control health costs by listing
medicines approved for government purchase or reimbursement, and
negotiating with drug firms to obtain the lowest prices. Among
the current TPP countries, such formularies are most associated
with New Zealand’s Pharmaceutical Management Agency (PHARMAC)
and Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), but they are
also used by other governments, including a number of federal
and state-based programs in the United States.

The
U.S. proposal seeks to restrict cost-saving drug formularies.
The leaked U.S. proposal for a pharmaceutical pricing chapter
restricts the use of such formularies, by requiring that countries
set up new administrative and judicial appeal systems to help
determine whether government programs “appropriately recognize
the value” of drug patents in their reimbursement proposals.
In Australia, the only country yet to implement such systems
under a trade agreement, the result has been higher drug prices.

NEGOTIATIONS
HAVE BEEN TAKING PLACE IN THE SHADOWS

The
Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have not been
transparent. Access to medicine has received the attention
it has because the U.S. proposals for intellectual property and
pharmaceutical pricing chapters for the pact have been leaked.
Neither of these, nor any other negotiating texts, has been
officially released. This is completely undemocratic, and
also outside the norm for many international negotiations,
including those at the World Trade Organization, where draft
negotiating texts are regularly published. This excessive
secrecy makes it extremely difficult for civil society to
comment on the negotiations in a productive way while the pact
is still under negotiation and such comments could be valuable.

The
Dracula Strategy Besides a stake to the heart, what’s the
best way to kill a blood-sucking vampire? Exposing it to
the light of day. Organizers have repeatedly stopped secretive
trade negotiations over the years by dragging them out of
the shadows and into public scrutiny:

• 1998:
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)

• 1999:
The “Millennial Round” of the World Trade Organization
(WTO)

• 2003:
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)

See
also:

Leaked
text of both the TPP's intellectual
property chapter and drug
formularies chapter reveal the United States pushing for the
TPP to (1) extend the length of drug patent monopolies and (2)
provide pharmaceutical companies new tools for challenging
government-run health programs' decisions regarding medicine
purchases.

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